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After several pitiful months of low funds, I’ve decided to pick up an old hobby and start working at the Auction House.  This post isn’t designed to walk you through my brilliant methods of generating vast sums of wealth (there are plenty of other blogs devoted to that and my methods aren’t nearly as profitable as theirs…nor would I describe them as brillaint).  Rather, this post is designed to discuss a couple rules of thumb that I’ve successfully employed.

Why?

This may seem like a basic question to ask but first ask yourself why you are playing the Auction House in the first place.  Are you looking to make enough to buy a coveted item or are you trying to set up a massive fortune that will ensure you never have to scrap by begging on the streets of Stormwind again?  The way you bid, buy out and price will all be a reflection of what your end goal is.  Hence the importance of answering this question before you even step through the front door.

Don’t Over Check Your Auctions

On the first day I posted my Auctions, I must have checked in on them a dozen times throughout the day.  Each time I saw someone else post something that I posted at a cheaper price, I panicked.  Would mine ever sell?  Should I take it off the market now?  Should I just call this whole exercise a wash, buy some Valor bracers and sell them on the Auction House (each time an Auction hadn’t sold, I was sorely tempted to take this route).

My answer to all these questions was to have a beer and see what the market does.  This may sound rather zen and fit oddly with the fast moving, capitalist nature of Azerothian Auction Houses but it does make sense.  There will always be folks looking to make a quick buck on their items and there will always be a market for those under priced items.  You can’t panic each time you see another player foolishly undercutting the minimum bid on an item that you’ve posted.  Instead, simply wait it out.  Sure, some of your items won’t sell but some will!  Take a deep breath and let the market decide what sells.

One final note: find someone on your server that you can pump for information.  There are two guys that I know I can ask any questions about the local economy on my server.  Big thanks to Bigg and Tovo for their fiscal wisdom!



I’ve recently switched my main from my Warlock to my Paladin for a number of reasons (most of them pivot around the need to bring in a well balanced group to our raids).  Reasons aside, there are some key differences in play style that I want to elaborate on.  My plan is to continue to document both major and minor changes as I come across them.  Below are the two most obvious that I’ve discovered so far.

Rotation
This has been one of the biggest surprises; I no longer care about my rotation.  For years, I had been a slave to my rotation, focusing on maximizing the uptime of my DOT’s and living between seconds to ensure that I was making the correct decisions about when to cast each spell.  Quartz and my Rotation add on were where the majority of my attention went during fights.

On the Paladin, my rotation has gone out of the window.  My rotation now relies on my judgment and the rhythm of the fight.  When I use my cool downs is compleley at my discretion.  At first, it felt a little awkward no longer relying on a program to tell me what to cast but as time has passed, I’ve really come to enjoy the freedom.

Pattern Recognition
On my Warlock, I spent a hell of a lot of time mastering mechanics while focusing with a laser like precision on doing everything possible to increase my DPS.  On my Paladin, I focus a lot more on the pattern of damage that is occurring with the Tanks and the DPS.  For instance, on the new Shannox fight in Firelands, I learned that tanks take a huge spike of damage whenever the dog returns from fetching the spear.  Coincidently, I also realized that minding mechanics is as important as a healer as it is as a DPS (stepping on a trap still makes you an asshole).

Both of these may seem like minor changes, but my entire play style has altered to accommodate them.  For the first time in a long time, WOW is feeling fresh and interesting again!

One recent Blue Post discussed some of the ways that Blizzard has imparted a sense of responsibility to damage dealing classes in raid instances.  Slorkuz’s full post had some interesting points about the necessity for damage dealers to respond to mechanics quickly or risk wiping the raid.  For instance, Valiona and Theralion have several mechanics that put a tremendous amount of responsibility on the DPS.  If your damage dealers fail to respond effectively, chances are you’ll fail the encounter.  Further, he partially attributed the difficulty of current raids to the responsibility that is put on the shoulders of DPS in many encounters.

While I agree in principal that putting more responsibility on the shoulders of damage dealers introduces more interesting raid mechanics and shows damage dealers how the other half lives, I think there are some faults with the current approach.  One of the major differences between tanks, healers and DPS is that tanks and healers ALWAYS have responsibility in raids and instances.  It’s built so deeply into their roles that they are familiar with the burden that hangs around their necks.  If a tank/healer make a mistake, everyone else suffers.

DPS on the other hand is rarely put into such a position.  If a DPS makes a mistake, the majority of encounters will continue on with very little interruption.  There is rarely a time when a DPS is directly responsible for the lives of others in game.  As a result, DPS has very little experience with that kind of burden.  That’s why new encounters that demand that damage dealers perform crucial tasks are so challenging for raids.  You’re asking someone who is used to hanging around the margins to step into the spotlight…and the costs are high when they fail.

Even with that criticism in place, I applaud Blizzard’s effort to try and attribute more accountability to DPS.  It often feels like the neglected leg of the stool as an encounter can progress with mediocre DPS but most encounters cannot progress with mediocre heals and tanking.  I just wish that Blizzard would associate an opportunity cost to the performance of your DPS rather than a failure penalty.  For instance, Blizzard could alter the Engulfing Magic debuff in Valiona and Theralion to a AOE damage debuff instead of a direct damage debuff.  This could take some of the teeth out of the encounter while keeping the burden on DPS to move.

One item that has gotten a lot of buzz on the PTR is Fandral’s Flamescythe.  This item allows Druids to turn into a flaming cat while in Feral form!  This is incredibly cool for Druids and I’ve got the feeling that many raiding guilds are going to be up to their ears with flame cats once 4.2 hits.  Check out the video here.

Unfortunately for Blizzard, this item got me thinking about the amount of attention and care that they give to specific classes in game.  While it’s nice for Druids to get this kind of individualized attention, it makes me wonder why all classes don’t have a dedicated team of artists and engineers devoted to adding slight graphical tweaks to classes?  After all, how difficult is it to create and animate assets for existing characters in the game?

For instance, one of my wish list items for Warlocks has been to add in green flames for all Warlock fire attacks.  Essentially, this boils down to changing the colors that are already in game for existing spells and abilities.  Alternately, what Death Knight wouldn’t want to change the color of their eyes or what Shadow Priest wouldn’t want to alter the color of their Shadow Aura?  It feels like with a minimal amount of effort, Blizzard could implement these slight changes and add some interesting choice to classes (Role Players would probably lose their minds for these alterations).

What all of this wool gathering comes down to is what are players’ expectations for $15 a month and what is Blizzard prepared to deliver?  For me, some slight visual changes would go a long way towards keeping the graphics fresh and interesting and with the sluggish content release schedule, it could help appease players that would otherwise leave.  What small visual changes would you make to your favorite classes?

Something is missing in this expansion and about half a million people have walked away as a result.  The absence of a sufficient amount of end game content is having a nasty effect on Blizzard’s ability to keep its players playing. The biggest gamble that Blizzard made with this expansion was to focus all of their resources on fixing Vanilla WOW.  After having leveled several characters through Old World content, I can’t help but feel that they’ve succeeded. The content feels fresh, the leveling curve is much less steep and the quests are interesting and compelling.

An unintended side effect of this focus on Vanilla WOW has been the absence of enough end game content.  Further, the pace of additional content releases has been significantly slower than previous expansions.  A couple of examples.  The Burning Crusade was released on 1/16/07 and the Black Temple was released with their first major content pack roughly five months later (5/22/07).  With the exception of the Sunwell, Black Temple and Zul Aman, the Burning Crusade was release with the following raid content: Gruul’s Lair, Tempest Keep, Karazan, Magtheridon, Serpentshrine Cavern and Battle of Mount Hyjal!  Wrath was released on 11/13/08 and their first content release, which included Ulduar was released 4/14/09 (about five months later).  With the exception of ICC, Ulduar, Ruby Sanctum, Onxyia’s Lair and Trial of the Crusader, Wrath released with Naxxaramas, Saratherion, Eye of Eternity and Vault of Archavon.

Today was a pretty big day for the geek in me, and I made sure to watch the Microsoft keynote today at E3. From Microsoft came news of some really neat Kinect integration with a brand-new dashboard, games galore using the world record holding hardware and a teaser from our favorite Spartain.

First up, Microsoft keynote awash in Xbox green. There is a new dashboard for the Xbox 360 coming in the Fall Update. It is very clean, and white, featuring panels that look alike like the ones in Windows 8. One of the most sought-after features of the new dashboard that wasn’t even announced at the keynote itself is cloud integration of both your Xbox Live profile and game saves. Also mentioned in the post-keynote press release is a ‘beacon’ that lets your friends know that you want to play certain games. Read more…

Welcome to The Daily Fan, where you get to see what we are reading, listening or tweeting about in our community of fan blogs, podcasts and other sites that cover Console, PC gaming, and much more (Movies this time around).

I have been on a personal mission to find great podcasts about movies. I got recommended Movielicious more times than I can remember but that has been my go to show since it started.  I got recommended a couple good ones via twitter but they didn’t hit the spot.  I realized I should start looking for shows about off beat movies, which fits more into my liking. I ended up running into a treasure trove of podcasts exclusively covering bad movies.  The following podcasts take bad movies that you might have looked over (read: would never watch in 100 years) and give them a try for a fun night of cheesy movie watching. Leave your recommendation for good or bad movie podcasts in the comments below!

	Bad Movie Podcast Bad Movie Podcast covers what you would never watch but after listening to a podcast about that movie, your next stop is Netflix.  Jim and Josh are able to take garbage and put more effort into the podcast than the director, actors, producers did when the movie was being made. My personal starting recommendation are ROTOR, Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle (starring Bill Mahr) or the Drive Funky episode
	Yeah It’s That Bad The difference between Bad Movie Podcast and Yeah It’s That Bad! Yeah It’s That Bad more than likely will cover movies you’ve heard of. The premise of the show is simple enough, take low rated movies on Rotten Tomatoes and then see if they really are that bad. Joel and Martin have the comradery that makes a podcast about bad movies listenable. Safe bet is to start on Boondock Saints, Freddy Got Fingered or Batman and Robin.
	How Did This Get Made If there is a mainstream podcast about bad movies, its ‘How Did This Get Made’. The hosts are Pauls Scheer (the League, Best Week Ever), June Diane Raphael (Flight of the Concords) and Jason Mantzoukas (the League). The show might be more palatable with the D-list actors, production and the movies they cover. Most of the time the show covers the latest releases and is worth a listen to. Might not sound like it but I do listen every week.

Want to suggest something to be featured on an upcoming Daily Fan?
Send it to Fondre@Rawrcast.com or twitter @Fondrewow

How does playing WoW help kill terrorists? The short answer is, nothing—directly. But the US Navy is using a WoW-like approach to helping solve modern-day problems facing today’s military.

When a new raid is dropped into World of Warcraft, it is well-known that Blizzard is watching the top raiding guilds as they make their way through the fights, and will actually make changes on the fly as guilds like Paragon find weaknesses or unbalanced elements in the encounters. Just like the GM’s in Blizzard, the US Navy is starting a pilot program pitting players against real-world problems and watching to see what works and what doesn’t.

Read more…